The disclosure relates generally to question answering systems, and more particularly, relates to type evaluation for determining a valid answer to a question in a question answering system.
In general, question answering is a computer science discipline concerned with building systems that automatically answer natural language questions. One approach to determining a valid answer to a natural language question is type evaluation. An existing type evaluation solution requires mapping both a lexical answer type (LAT) for a question and the candidate answer to a structured taxonomy and checking for a path between them. This solution works properly when the LAT and the candidate answer exist in the same taxonomy. However, this is often not case for an open-domain natural language question answering system where a wide variety of words can be used to specify the LAT and candidate answer.
There is a need for an improved solution for type evaluation used in question answering systems.